The show, which chronicles the history of ideas, is among the first BBC programmes to have its complete archive made accessible online, said Tim Davie, the director of BBC audio and music, speaking today at the Manchester Media Festival.

"Next year, we will launch a new In Our Time archive that will be available for anyone who wants to access a full 11 years of quite superb broadcasts on the history of ideas featuring everything from Schopenhauer to the Death of Elizabeth I," Davie said. The current website features only a selection of episodes form the series.

Copyright - as well as the immense amount of material - is one of the tasks the problems the team had to solve in their current project to open up the BBC archive. "We are currently developing our audio archive so that we can provide resources of enormous and lasting value," says Davie.

Website operators will be able to embed episodes - and the BBC plans to enrich them with complementary video and audio material from their archive.